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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28542843">heat death</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternitas/pseuds/eternitas'>eternitas</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>MANEATER [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hetalia: Axis Powers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Comfort, Depression, Incubus England, M/M, Mental Illness, Succubi &amp; Incubi, fulfillment, sentimentality</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 23:02:50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>13,825</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28542843</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternitas/pseuds/eternitas</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>At the height of his instability, Alfred meets a strange incubus.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>America/England (Hetalia)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>MANEATER [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2125020</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>36</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>heat death</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>content notes: discussion/depiction of mental illness, some physical violence (mentioned, fight, a depiction of burning)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>So every morning he wakes up the way he falls asleep, which is to say on his back, the clear light of day (white, blinding) slanted across what small part of the ceiling he can see without turning his head and flattening the pillow; and so every night he has troubled dreams—heat death—claustrophobia—living and dying, alone, in the same place—to which he can’t ever sensibly react, except to spin them each into nondescript stories for the schoolchildren. So he has fallen into depression again, or so they think. It is nothing he can confess to a therapist, to even his brother. Whenever he speaks he does so with the brassy self-assurance of—something, perhaps, not himself, certainly not—and he gets the impression that all the world is a door before whose inflexibility he cowers endlessly. But this is all a joke. If his own death stands imminent, he thinks, it’s his own problem to gleefully ignore. And why dwell?</p><p>At the first sign of dusk Alfred climbs, at last, out of bed, and dresses: his undershirt, his jacket. Both of these he pulls tighter around himself. He’s out of coffee and milk, probably something else too, and without so much as checking he steps into the street.</p><p>His city’s a humble labyrinth of which, even after years of living within it, he still has very little direction. To a tourist he might say, “Where are you trying to go? Ah, there? You probably don’t need to take all those roads, but—” (and here he will chuckle, make a show of his own endearing confusion)—but he needs only the view from his apartment, the elm, the streetlight, which he would sketch out on the corner of some time-worn piece of paper if he knew how, to feel contentment; to live in reasonable comfort he needs even less. So he walks, he does not think as he walks, and it is just as well.</p><p>Down to the intersection.</p><p>Taking the southernmost road.</p><p>Chill to the air: perhaps it’ll rain soon. Evening rain.</p><p>But because it takes effort to be thoughtless, because true farce has never characterized in any significant manner his life, his attention comes soon to that possibility of rain—rain, and separate oddities. And he wonders how, after all, his brother is doing, the same brother with whom he never speaks except to share platitudes, studying abroad in that country filled with nothing but rain. His hands in his pockets shift. If he were a different person, different in a cosmic sense, it would not be with this strange feeling twelve steps from regular longing that he considers his family; but he has never spent much time at all on subjects of no interest to him, and so as he continues to walk he feels progressively lonelier, and wilder, until with a start he realizes—that a crow is passing overhead, and the thought vanishes whole.</p><p>An inexplicable dread rattles his skull.</p><p>Past the floral shop, the laundromat, past the bar—</p><p>Had he once heard a song about a bar? Perhaps it was only a song sung at bars, written for bars. Rocky road to somewhere, drunken sailor in a longboat. Oral histories. Even in his hometown he was not a drinker, age his excuse, but his mood is already such that he dissolves easily into a memory, warm and silver, of beer shared around a firepit. It loosens his next steps forward, but also heightens the feeling like rain over darkened streets which he can’t quite call nervousness, or apprehension, or anything approximating either.</p><p>In his head they’re singing still.</p><p>By degrees which are too small to note, the shouting of a full chorus converges into two voices; the sound of the current fight, in other words, reaches him before the sight of it.</p><p>And at this his breath is hitching in disbelief: two men, one of them blond, clawing at one another, cursing.</p><p>The blond hooks his nails into his opponent’s shoulders—he kicks him in the groin—one of his ears, then, is seized by the teeth. And how much more purposefully this blond moves than his opponent—see it, the way every hit falls like this and like that. <em>You little bitch, little fucking bastard</em>. Fly’s hum. Noise eclipsed by the following blow, the next, the next. <em>Fucking</em>—he thinks he hears <em>fucking</em>. It’s garbled.</p><p>Alfred can’t speak. The blond is lunging again, he is bringing them both to the ground. To access his sides, to break his head—haze of neon garbage, speech strangled by ale—to pull close to come apart to maim to kill. There is a bark, a laugh, the shape of a taunt.</p><p>With a brisk punch to the stomach that other man is doubling over, spitting a bloody morsel.</p><p>From Alfred, now, finally, in a voice like a stranger’s: “<em>You!</em>”</p><p>They stop. “Shit,” Alfred hears after a hesitation, “shit, shit” (the bodies untangling), and as the blond, the evident victor, quite suddenly collapses, that other man is dragged away. Around his eye the progression of a bruise.</p><p>Uneasy quiet settles, and then the hum of the powerlines.</p><p>The hum—</p><p>“Hey—”</p><p>Alfred draws closer.</p><p>Bruises, too, on the blond’s face, and bleeding cuts, and smudges of indistinct color. His eyelids twitch: they never shut.</p><p>“Hey, can you—you need help, don’t you? God, of course—damn it—”</p><p>The body, the living body. Mirage underwater. In a blink’s length it warps.</p><p>Alfred sees it, then.</p><p>The eyes whose luster, whose depth appear in contrast to the beetle-black sclera; the thin tail like a whip; the diminutive horns (the soft thighs, the tattered wings—)</p><p>Something thick suffusing the air. Alfred retrieves his phone from his pocket. <em>He</em> sighs in his unconsciousness, low, mangled. And stirs.</p><p>“Hey, hey, don’t worry, don’t worry, I’ve got you now—uh, <em>shit</em>, I can—but you—<em>shit–</em>”</p><p>Perhaps <em>he</em> means to press a finger to Alfred’s lips and shut him up, but all he does instead is jab him in the cheek, over and over again. His eyes open further; his mouth opens for the first time.</p><p>“Oh…” A melodious sound, aching beneath heavy stupor and vocal fry.</p><p>“Handsome…”</p><p><em>He</em> faints, his free arm sprawled on the asphalt. Again his image ripples, the bestial features (perhaps?—but that isn’t quite right) on the cusp of disappearance—and this they do, and Alfred is left with a normal man, blood like sap smeared across the gape of his mouth.</p><p>He calls an ambulance.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>So suppose <em>he</em> is expected to recover, the drunkenness at least, by next afternoon, Alfred left trying to discern the rest of the doctors’ synopsis before letting up to pace, with a little worry, the room. A nurse tends to the areas where <em>he</em> has been most severely wounded, the wounds for which there exist no descriptors but severe.</p><p>Suppose he does call his brother: “They just don’t tear at each other’s fucking throats like those guys did, Mattie, not anymore—God, you really should have seen it—but I’m scared for him, you know? Or for the other guy. Or for me, but not really. I don’t know what the hell he is, I think I’m hallucinating—but really, it might have been an alien thing. Think about it: it was night, and he was stronger than hell, and I do think he had wings.” </p><p>He pictures the long sigh, the hand cupped over the receiver. And then: “That’s nice, but if you call me at this time again I’ll snap your spine in half.”</p><p>Suppose he is made to leave the hospital within the hour (not a relative, sir) but lingers for another beside a smoking man, uttering feverishly to himself an extension of that earlier theory while his companion with rheum at the eyes nods and nods.</p><p>Suppose he realizes the next morning that all his earlier passion has been illusory: worthless, run to ruin, his body for ever and ever in the gutter.</p><p>Suppose he realizes that he really had forgotten to buy milk and coffee.</p><p>Suppose Alfred returns home after work carrying bags in both hands, believes he meets a pair of eyes glowing in the veritable dark of the apartment as he shuts the door behind him. Suppose he dismisses the notion, flicks on the light, and finds someone, not a stranger, not a friend, sitting on the couch with a book spread out across his lap.</p><p>Alfred can’t help himself: he screams.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>
 <em>His name is Arthur. </em>
</p><p><em>Arthur is </em> <em> a demon. </em> <em> an incubus. He says I should know what this means. </em></p><p>
<em>Arthur is a student at a school for demons. Doing a project for finals. </em>
</p><p>
 <em>Twenties. Cannot age naturally, but will keep physical appearance up to date w chronological time. Can die (killed). </em>
</p><p>Pensively he looks down at his own scrawl, thinking that, for a nonbeliever of magic, it was with remarkable ease that he accepted the word of the man presently surveying him from across the table (green-eyed glare, cheek cupped in palm). Gone are the horns, the tail.</p><p>“And you need to—you’re <em>going</em> to stay in my apartment until you’re finished with your project.”</p><p>“You’re very clever.”</p><p>Gone, too, are the wounds and the bandages, his clothing a wool sweater alongside plain trousers.</p><p>“What do you think gives you the right?”</p><p>Something deeply impressive, he thinks, about Arthur’s scowl. Such deep contempt, such furious spurning on such a—well. It is a nice face: the strong brow, the keen eyes sparkling. He’s known people with either, but certainly not both: and this is the first instance, in his recent memory at least, of features so finely—but why not just say gorgeously?—so gorgeously knit he might recognize them from across a gathering, a crowded room. The longer he stares, the more natural this expression feels, until all his sensation becomes a hot, guilt-laden prickling at his stomach which he immediately represses.</p><p>Here he is, now: Arthur, unbelievably, in all the wax-white light of the moon.</p><p>“I know you,” Arthur says, like he really does. The edge of his lip curling: a little smirk.</p><p>Alfred is wondering, the thought his only one, if this is how infatuation feels.</p><p>“Don’t you… know any other demons?” he asks, forcing himself to assume an even tone.</p><p>“None in this area.”</p><p>“Any other humans?”</p><p>“They’d beaten the shit out of me. Well—not so. I did better.”</p><p>“Why? What did you do to them? Did they know what you are?”</p><p>(What Alfred does not ask: What are you doing to me?)</p><p>For a moment Arthur doesn’t answer, stroking the tablecloth while he directs his attention to that idyllic piece of city beyond the windowpane. His view can’t be so very clear: a thin fog, white, smothers the glass.</p><p>He is not even glancing at Alfred when he replies. Two lovers, reduced to earth-colored silhouettes, whisper to one another on the sidewalk, and he brushes his finger over the place where they stand.</p><p> “I was drunk.”</p><p>“So?”</p><p>The scowl is fixed again upon Alfred. “I was drunk. I don’t remember.”</p><p>Alfred’s tone less smooth now, more hesitant: “Can’t you even guess?”</p><p>Arthur looks at him the way Alfred does his students when one of them asks a truly stupid question. It’s a noticeable change from that earlier glare, a newer and more distantly sentimental quality to it now, but if Alfred realizes at all he says nothing.</p><p>“You’re pouting,” Arthur tells him. “Petulant.”</p><p>“I am—” But if he were to say <em>I am not</em>, would Arthur laugh? Would he smile, the moonlight turning this much richer as it illuminates his hair, his face, the stitching at his sleeve? “—not. I’m not being petulant, or whatever, I am just asking you a question and I don’t understand how you can keep giving me these, like, casual answers without realizing how weird this all is for me. You’re not even human—”</p><p>“That I’m not.”</p><p>“Exactly!” Alfred’s fists come down on the table, and at this Arthur does not flinch. He leans subtly closer.</p><p>“You’re not even human and the first time I met you it was in a fight. I don’t even know what reasons you could give that could convince me this whole situation is normal, and—and I’m—God, I’m so confused. You’d better tell me what the hell is going on, is what I’m trying to get at.”</p><p>“Is that a threat?”</p><p>“It’s—huh.”</p><p>Arthur has said it in a purr, loose and sickly-soft. Alfred fails to recognize this for a moment, and another moment, and another—and then he is pushing himself back in the chair, his face contorted by utter surprise. Caught, trapped in the unconscious moment before a gasp, a horrified shout.</p><p>“Oh, but you’re fun,” Arthur is saying, now, standing in a wan sliver of light. His hair’s nearly silver.</p><p>“I’m—”</p><p>“Listen to me,” he cuts in.</p><p>“You’re a strange thing. Aren’t all people? Just now: you were looking at me like something in you was about to split open. Do you honestly believe I’m a stranger to this kind of reaction?</p><p>“I wake at five every morning and stay out until nearly midnight if I don’t want the trouble of strangers’ lust, because I can’t be trusted to exist—with passion, with hunger—in the same world as you people, working the same jobs, travelling the same commute. And these days I don’t go out to see anyone, not really. Do you think, after all this, that I’m in a mood to be questioned? Hardly not, least of all from someone like you who has nothing <em>but</em> questions.</p><p>“You’re unusual, you know that? For your restraint, I mean. And I could just as easily hate you for it, because really, in action you’re completely bloody clueless about what I know you’re feeling. But I don’t, and this is the world I’ve found myself in: I trust in you before I trust in anybody else, because you’re clueless and because you’re unusual—and if one day I find myself so upset I visit a pub heedless of how I know its patrons will treat me, and if I get into a fight knowing that the idea itself is ridiculous and the consequences will be severe just because one of them sidled up to me and whispered something filthy and fucking rubbed his hands all over me, what of it? It meant I met a human who brought me to safety. It gave me a place to stay for the first time since I came here.”</p><p>Alfred returns to his former position, blinks. Once, twice. He doubts Arthur can distinguish even the twitch of his hands, but from across the table he is watching anyway (predator, prey, the snapping of teeth).</p><p>“And… after the hospital visit? What did you do then?” The distance between them vast, bathed in shadow.</p><p>Arthur’s head tilts, but he answers so swiftly there is not even a remote possibility of shame.</p><p>“They left me alone, relatively. Getting out of the hospital was not an issue at all, and I slipped out while no one was looking. You know. I had some time to myself after that. I learned who you were—never mind how—and walked the streets for some time, not really hungry. It’s a filthy place, you know, never cleaned or looked after.</p><p>“And what happened then, I can tell you easily. There were clouds over the moon. Really, it was almost entirely dark. I was crouched in an alley for a long time, thinking to myself, trying to remember why I’d come here at all. And I turned it over in my head, over and over, just what you’d done for me, and I realized it had been the first really distinct memory of here I’d had yet. </p><p>“This is what I can tell you easily, now. I left the alley sooner or later, clinging to the edges of walls. I healed my bruises, and I—well, I came to you.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>So Arthur came to him, and he stayed until morning, and even now Alfred cannot believe absolutely that he really is here, perfectly sprightly and drinking tea when Alfred has just woken, a new body to take up the couch in the night. Some part of him hopes he’ll leave—before the week is over, before his sick brain can reconcile the image of Arthur with his reality—but he stays, impossibly, and Alfred is left to go to work the way he always does, imagining Arthur will disappear when he is no longer in sight.</p><p>The world, he thinks, asks all too much of him.</p><p>His school, an uninteresting affair: the walls are concrete, the students without ambition. As a teacher he’s reasonably well-liked, owing to his youth and attitude and, he supposes, some amount of charm, but this feels unimportant for someone who has never had difficulty being liked on at least a superficial level. And as he stands outside his classroom door under lights filled with beetles, he wonders if anyone passing by, the students, his colleagues, knows he has an incubus reading romance novels in his living room; and he refuses to acknowledge that, just a few hours later, Arthur has already taken over what insignificant bit of life he’d had to himself before his arrival.</p><p>A girl smirks at him as she enters. He smiles back, because it feels good to be part of an exchange, however minimal; he does not dwell upon it. When the bell rings and he himself steps inside, and the students refuse, naturally, to quiet, he clears his throat more than once, considering (a little hysterically) how it might feel to be crushed to death beneath the fantastic weight of the ceiling. (It is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.)</p><p>“So,” he begins. A cough itches at his throat: he suppresses it.</p><p> “Your packets are due today. I’ll be collecting them at the end of class, and in the meantime we’ll be continuing our review—”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>The sound of the shutting door seems to echo, and his first thoughts are for Arthur.</p><p>“I’m home,” he calls. How nice to call that.</p><p>But he receives no reply, so of course he purses his lips and begins to search the apartment. Arthur, strange Arthur, was left that morning under the pretense that he could acquaint himself with the home, he could make use of whatever facilities he liked—but he is not in the living room, the kitchen. The idea occurs to him that perhaps Arthur really has left, or had been a delusion of his all along.</p><p>A delusion, a hallucination. He has had the difference explained to him, but somehow this does not feel like the kind of matter which he’s wont to recall on command. Is he hopeless?—he certainly doesn’t think so, and if he were he wouldn’t resolve to wonder about it like a searching child, like an ascetic with trembling hands turned up in prayer, and moreover he would know of a sensible cure.</p><p>Alfred circles, again thoughtless, back to the foyer. </p><p>A second pair of shoes is here.</p><p>On noticing, he immediately walks, then jogs in the bedroom’s direction. Pushes open the door (slightly ajar), hurries in to find—</p><p>Arthur. Arthur with horns and wings and tail, buried under a quilt and a blanket which rise, which sink with his breathing, peaceful and predictably gentle. His eyes are closed. They open on hearing Alfred: a pantomime of sleep.</p><p>“You could knock.” Muffled.</p><p>Alfred suspects he already knows the answer (he knows he does), but still he asks, “What is going on?”</p><p>Arthur stretches before he answers, a motion too particular to be considered lazy. Alfred watches the quaver of his arms.</p><p>“I had a gentleman friend over,” he says, and it sounds like a joke, it really sounds like a goddamn joke, a parody of an Englishman and a parody of a pervert, but he has such a way of spacing each word he speaks or hisses or whispers with improbable deliberation that Alfred accepts this excuse instantly as not only accurate but normal.</p><p>Arthur continues, “I’d expected him to leave before you came back, but he’s using the toilet still. He should be gone within a few minutes.”</p><p>“You—” An inhale, now. <em>You fed from him?</em> He dares not ask this aloud.</p><p>“Anyway,” says Arthur (brash, impossible), “I want to rest, so you can go entertain yourself or work or what have you. I won’t be longer than another hour or two.” With that, he returns imperiously to mock-sleep.</p><p>“Hey, hey—” Alfred begins to shake him, then withdraws his hand as if bitten. “You can’t—you can’t do this, okay? You can’t be inviting people over and—and having them in my bed. You can’t do that.”</p><p>Arthur rolls to face him. “Are you going to stop me?” It’s spat like a rhetorical question.</p><p>“God, I don’t know! I might!”</p><p>This is met with another curl of the lip: more pathetic than amusing, and certainly not enough of either to be dignified with a laugh.</p><p>“I really wish I could find you funny. I really do. You aren’t a great host, are you?”</p><p>Why does he bother?</p><p>“At least go to the couch!” Alfred is still shouting, his raised voice the shrill, hysteric thing at which people either scowl or wince.</p><p>“I’d prefer not to.”</p><p>“Jesus fucking—I will throw you out of there myself if I need to! I’m serious!”</p><p>His fists clench and it’s childish, he knows it’s childish. The following silence, however, makes him really pause to wonder whether it might be horrible to let the threat settle between them.</p><p>Then Arthur raises an eyebrow.</p><p>“Aren’t you a brat,” he says, for some God-given reason, and sits up, and peels the covers away. Once the bed is again made (a task which Alfred has never, even when he has had energy, attempted) he turns.</p><p>“Well, then, lead me to the couch.” Little prince.</p><p>Only two thoughts as Arthur follows him there: how disconcerting it is to hear footsteps behind you, occupying the same space that you’ve convinced yourself is relegated forever to loneliness; and how discomforting, honestly, to think of all the people Arthur has yet to bring here, laughing merrily as they drunkenly lean against him, their voices smothered, their faces obscured. Alfred has never heard real conversation and real, uncontrolled happiness in the mess of his cheap apartment, something like that can’t ever exist as long as he’s alone, and Arthur’s joy—well, it seems too obvious to say.</p><p>At last they’re in the living room, and Alfred gestures to the couch.</p><p>“There you are, sir. Don’t have too much fun.”</p><p>Arthur takes a moment to lie down on his side, his clasped hands pillowing his head. Alfred blinks and he reverts noiselessly to his human disguise; his eyes, through all this, don’t close, and it looks as though he has no intention of sleeping yet.</p><p>From the kitchen, the clock ticks.</p><p>“Alright, hold on,” Alfred grumbles.</p><p>He goes back to his room, takes what he needs, goes to the kitchen. Every time he thinks of Arthur, it’s of his presence first and foremost: that vivid, ironical thing, impossible to know. Does he realize how he affects others, unconscious of it? Stupid question: he’d said himself that he does, hadn’t he? How long has it taken him to get used to it? (What does he like?)</p><p>The squeal of the kettle spoils the reverie. In silence he works, and in silence he returns to the living room.</p><p>Arthur has sat up on the couch again, waiting for Alfred. In a few strides Alfred crosses the room, placing in Arthur’s now outstretched hands a mug of chamomile tea, a soft gray blanket. Momentarily he wonders if Arthur might like him to tuck him in, too, but even Arthur is not this irresponsible (in more ways, he supposes, than one).</p><p>“Thank you,” Arthur says. It’s gentle.</p><p>Alfred should not be startled by this, but he is. “Um.”</p><p>“Forget what I’d said. You really are funny.”</p><p>Alfred leaves the room before Arthur can see him panic.</p><p>Papers to grade, chores to get done. He returns to his desk under some guise of productivity; he ends up not doing any of it, but he stares at the walls, at the dusty photograph he keeps there of something unimportant, humming the beginnings of songs he has never listened to carefully enough to finish. The winter solstice is closer at hand than the summer: in an hour the room will pulse, auburn, golden, with the last fading light of day, and he will still be here, dreaming.</p><p>Curiosity, too, is a form of fear.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>He wishes something bad had happened to him, or that he was beyond all doubt a bad person, a murderer maybe, a loveless beast, if only so that his illness could be justified somehow. So long spent living, the measured days, with his childhood no more than a blur of Sunday afternoons and other people’s faces. He imagines the illness, the self-imposed trauma with no root, no origin, prying open his brain and prying open his chest, himself supine, and the atrophy: his memories of tomorrow and of yesterday will dissipate, he will occupy a present filled with television static. The crows will pick at his bones until he falls dead.</p><p>How had he come to this city? How had his brother, once his shadow, surpassed him until their positions were not only reversed but shifted entirely, Alfred not merely forgettable but shameful? He dissects rats for indifferent students and feels nausea, then comfort. Arthur had been reading an article on decay when Alfred first came in, dropping his bags, contents spilling all across the floor, a tin can, a blood orange. He picked up the book later and studied the crow on the page, the diagrams with their presentiments of rot.</p><p>And don’t you remember your first lover? A pitiful cry of a relationship, six months long. Toward the end they met just on the weekends and Alfred hated himself every time his thoughts came to him, during class or idling at home, wondering how sweet it might be to fall asleep against his shoulder. Arthur can have anyone he likes and he despises even the cordiality of romance. And Alfred—he does not envy this, he does not wish he has what Arthur does. But wouldn’t it please him to understand?</p><p>Tonight Arthur brings home someone new, takes them to the couch. Alfred listens from his room. Within a minute the two of them are cursing, they are at one another’s throats. He hears them hitting the ground, and the shouting.</p><p>The slamming of the door is punctuated by this from Arthur, in a voice that only rises: “And rot in hell, you fucking <em>bastard!</em>”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>“Show me around the city,” Arthur says one day over breakfast. He had tried to cook for them, burnt the eggs. They are not, Alfred supposes, as bad as they could be.</p><p>“What? Why?”</p><p>Arthur clicks his tongue, like he’s talking to a dog. “Don’t speak while you’re chewing,” he says, then crosses his arms. “And you’d spent the last weekend alternating between the bed and the television, letting the best of your youth go to waste. Besides, I haven’t had the chance to explore on my own terms, and with you by my side I figure it’d be easier even with other people around.”</p><p>It would be easier, Alfred thinks, if he were manic, or at least approaching it, a resolution which he would sooner go to his grave than confess to Arthur.</p><p>“Yeah,” he says. He stabs the eggs, brings them to his lips to eat, then pushes the plate away and stands when he finishes. “Yeah, okay. Let’s go.”</p><p>“You want to go right now?”</p><p>Turning to look at him. “Is there anything else you need to do first?”</p><p>“You aren’t going to let me get dressed? Let me brush my teeth?”</p><p>“Man, fuck your clothes and your teeth.”</p><p>But Alfred does let him take care of what he needs, using the bathroom himself once Arthur exits with his hair fruitlessly combed. It is not long, still, less than a half-hour, before they find themselves passing through an empty park, unclear which way to turn.</p><p>“You told me you’d show me the places you liked best.”</p><p>“I did say that.”</p><p>“And we haven’t gotten anywhere.”</p><p>“That’s true.”</p><p>“And we—”</p><p>“God, hold on, okay?”</p><p>Arthur looks very much like he is about to turn home himself. “Are you really looking up directions?”</p><p>“Maybe! I don’t know!”</p><p>“Christ.”</p><p>Alfred looks up from his phone. “I didn’t know you could say that.”</p><p>“What?” Arthur gives a cursory laugh. “Did you think I had a shock collar on?”</p><p>“Don’t bring collars into this. Also, save me your little snarky questions.”</p><p>And in the first place, it is proving exceedingly difficult to find any places they can visit: cafes and restaurants wouldn’t do at this hour, lounges either because of Arthur’s—charms? pheromones? Something to that effect, anyway—and all the rest evade him.</p><p>“Why don’t we just stay around here and see what we find? I like this park, anyway.”</p><p>Arthur sighs audibly, relents.</p><p>They walk, the two of them, the perimeter of the park, sit on a bench for some time, and then move to the grass to watch the drift of passerby when a couple comes to take their seat. Arthur visibly relaxes: it must help, certainly, to just observe for once. The leaves fall one at a time, no wind to carry them.</p><p>Within several minutes they run out of things worth looking at, and they begin to talk.</p><p>Their conversation:</p><p>“I wish I could be one of those people who just fishes with cranes or catches, like, little animals with falcons instead of working the kind of day jobs they have here. I dunno. It just sounds cool.”</p><p>“Next you’ll tell me you have aspirations of being a goat farmer.”</p><p>“Well, now I do.”</p><p>“Really, now.”</p><p>“I mean, yeah? No one wants to be a high school biology teacher. Alright, well, I did at one point, but no one who’s actually tried teaching high school students biology enjoys doing it, or would want to do it until retirement. The only goddamn animals you work with are dead ones, and the class pets keep dying after one semester.”</p><p>“I do believe you could say the same about farming goats. It can’t be that rewarding.”</p><p>“I… okay, that’s true.”</p><p>Their conversation:</p><p>“I don’t know, I like the feeling of being scared. I think it’s like being surprised. I always get really bad around horror movies, but after, uh… fuck, what’s it called? After <em>action</em>, I’d say it’s my favorite kind of thing to watch.”</p><p>“Hmm.”</p><p>“What about you?”</p><p>“I don’t really remember getting the chance to watch anything like that.  …I like documentaries, though.”</p><p>“Seriously? Like BBC and shit?”</p><p>“Quiet, you. They put me to sleep.”</p><p>“You don’t watch movies to be put to sleep.”</p><p>“Speak for yourself.”</p><p>Their conversation:</p><p>“I don’t consider myself a bad cook. I just get too excited in the kitchen.”</p><p>“That’s a good excuse if I’ve ever heard one.”</p><p>Their conversation:</p><p>“What’s it like where you’re from?”</p><p>“Uneventful. Not much fire. Not much color, either.”</p><p>“Really?”</p><p>“It’s a shapeless place. That’s the only way I can describe it: it’s shapeless. Down there everyone’s gotten too tired to have real things to say, so you know what everyone is going to tell you long before they ever open their mouths to speak. As for the scenery, well. You notice fairly quickly that a dead tree has the same shape as the veins on the backs of your eyelids.”</p><p>“I can’t say I know anything like that. So you didn’t like being there?”</p><p>“What do you think? Of course I didn’t. I wouldn’t go back, either, if I didn’t have a choice. At least you can see the sky here.”</p><p>“The sky…”</p><p>“Yes, at day or at night. I’m not picky. Oh, look at that—it’s already afternoon.”</p><p>“Shit, really?”</p><p>Alfred stands, winces at the sudden dark spots that rise to blur his vision. They fade after a heartbeat.</p><p>“That was nice. I guess we’d better head back home or something. You hungry?”</p><p>Arthur extends his hand for Alfred to take, and he helps support him as he, too, stands.</p><p>“I suppose a little.”</p><p>“Alright. We can get you a scone on the way home.”</p><p>They do, and they are well on their way back to the apartment complex, passing shops, passing trees, most of them far from bare. A cloud of pigeons is on the ground before them.</p><p>Alfred stops walking and says, “Look. They’re sky rats.”</p><p>Arthur says, “What?”</p><p>“You know!” Alfred turns to gesture enthusiastically at him. “Sky rats. Rats of the sky. They fit all the criteria.”</p><p>“I’m just saying you’re making very little sense right now.”</p><p>“Look—dude, have you ever seen a baby pigeon?”</p><p>“I haven’t, but that’s—”</p><p>“So they’re drones! Drones, or else sky rats. They get everywhere like sand and their eyes are creepy and lifeless as hell. I rest my case.”</p><p>Arthur opens his mouth; a pigeon, fattened, made bold by excessive feeding, flies over to take his scone.</p><p>“Oh—”</p><p>Alfred shoos it away. A sudden glimmer, then, lights his eyes, something immutable, and he runs forward into the cloud, ignoring the single note of confusion from Arthur behind him.</p><p>Alfred is crying out—“Rot in hell, you rats!”—and his arms are jutting in every direction and more, pigeons scattering, onlookers muttering in concern.</p><p>Someone behind him laughs and laughs. It’s a stranger, Alfred thinks, but there’s a quality to the laugh he recognizes, artless and entrancing, that compels him to slowly turn around.</p><p>Arthur stands there, his cheeks and nose red from the cold, his grin so wide that Alfred instantly matches it.</p><p>“Oh, fucking hell, you’re so stupid,” he’s trying to say, but he won’t even stop laughing long enough to finish.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Whoever has left the note has written it in a scrawl so indecipherable that Alfred reads it four times over before he understands what it means.</p><p>He turns, enters the apartment again. Arthur continues to read from his position on the couch.</p><p>“Forgot something?”</p><p>Alfred drops his bag at his side.</p><p>“No,” he replies in a tone only subtly exasperated. “The building’s on lockdown for the rest of the day. That’s about all I could figure out.”</p><p>“Oh, honestly?” Arthur heaves a sigh, moves over so Alfred can sit.</p><p>“I guess we have enough to eat until then. You’ve called your school already?”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>They look away from one another, an approximation of embarrassment.</p><p>Then Alfred says, “What are you reading?”</p><p>He barely understands the explanation that follows, but still he asks Arthur to read him a passage from the book, the one he’s on, “just so I can get it”; and Arthur looks happy enough to oblige, his reading voice as smooth and subdued as a recollection of a daydream. It’s low fantasy, the kind with enough realism to disorient him and language that twists and proliferates in the manner of climbing vines, and the rest he leaves Arthur to fawn over himself.</p><p>At noon they prepare lunch together, bump into one another more than once in the constraints of the small kitchen. Alfred falls asleep at his desk afterward, among papers like dove wings. Arthur shakes him awake for their evening meal, which is burnt; after eating, Arthur in the living room scribbles with some frustration in a journal, then claps it shut, staring tiredly at the wall.</p><p>“Do you want me to put something on?” Alfred asks him, gesturing to the television.</p><p>Arthur touches a finger to his lips. “Somehow it never occurred to me… but yes.”</p><p>So with Silence of the Lambs running, Alfred shivers, sound floating haplessly around his brain, almost clings to Arthur but doesn’t. At the film’s middle, he is stricken by an idea which writhes in his head and prevents him from any emotion but—but he does not have a word for it, this emotion, knowing only that it is precisely what he feels every day, greater in force, made too loud to tolerate.</p><p>“What’s wrong?” Arthur squeezes his arm.</p><p>Alfred isn’t sure.</p><p>“My brother—work—family—too little time—all of it—”</p><p>“Hush,” Arthur says. “I know, I know.”</p><p>Alfred knows he doesn’t, but he likes it anyway, this illusion of safety.</p><p>The film continues to play. His thoughts flicker until he thinks he understands what he means.</p><p>He falls asleep just like that, on the couch, and in the transitory state before waking and unconsciousness he speaks until even Arthur’s shape above him fades:</p><p>“What you said. The night we met. How you don’t go out to see anyone these days—I’m the same way. I don’t see anyone either, and I think I’m okay with dying like this, even if I die today, even if I die tomorrow. People in the neighborhood mention it all the time. In the summer, ‘that person hasn't left their house in—a month, now?’ And I’ve never been able to feel bad about it. Sometimes I’ll remember everything bad that happened to me at the same time, and it’s not this fact alone but the knowledge that no one will ever know unless I tell them about it, that the warped self that exists in the minds of others is the only self I’ll ever have whether I die or not, it’s that which makes me want to stay here in place forever until the walls close in on me. In my dreams there’s blood all over my floor… shards of glass on the floor…”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>So Alfred notices fewer and fewer visitors brought in, or at least less evidence of it: Arthur does not stride, he creeps around the apartment, and at times he stumbles, clutching the edges of walls and countertops. Exhaustion, or something much like it.</p><p>“Are you okay?” he asks after they’ve finished their meal, idle now on the couch. The kiss marks across Arthur’s collarbone, once prominent enough to force his eyes away (forever with a number of stammered excuses) every time they came there, have faded: drowsy kisses, implications of kisses.</p><p>“Oh, I just can’t stand all the rubbish the usual routine comes with,” Arthur announces, following a meaningless pause, with a little theatrical wave of the hand. Perhaps this is the kind of non sequitur that precedes one of the speeches of which he seems eternally fond; but he says nothing, and Alfred prods him so that he might continue.</p><p>“What?” His expression’s a void. “I mean it.”</p><p>“You seem to tolerate me.”</p><p>“Well, yes.” Arthur offers no further explanation, and they watch the remainder of the documentary without a word between them.</p><p>It is when he stands to retire for the evening, notices a pair of horns in his periphery, that he finds himself pushed back onto the couch.</p><p>The demon-eyes fix him and hold him, hold him there.</p><p>“But I’m so glad you’ve noticed,” Arthur is saying, and Alfred stares still at the kaleidoscope dream that is his natural form.</p><p>Arthur’s outstretched hand hovers before him; his voice lowers, like someone imparting a secret. His breath feathers across Alfred’s cheek.</p><p>“You’re so kind. You’re so good.”</p><p>He could have uttered other praises after this, but to Alfred they are all nonsensical, nothing reaching him save the inexplicable feeling of somebody’s fingers wrapped around his throat, shoved down his throat. He blinks: Arthur’s hand is still hovering; apart from pushing him back into his current position, his thoughts caught, he has not once touched him.</p><p>“Won’t you help me?” Arthur asks. The <em>feed me</em> that would normally follow is left for Alfred alone to discern.</p><p>Alfred, who is overcome suddenly with the urge to fawn and flee and kiss Arthur and kiss him and kiss him and drop dead and drive his own stupid fucking head into the wall until he bleeds and bleeds and bleeds—</p><p>“I—I don’t—I’m—”</p><p>His eyes fill with tears. Tears trickle, then stream down his face, and then he is sobbing in near-silence.</p><p>Arthur gapes.</p><p>“Oh, dearest—”</p><p>A feeling of shelter. Alfred glances up and he sees Arthur has tucked one of his wings around him like a shroud, Arthur’s arms wrapped around his waist.</p><p>“You’re okay, you’re okay…”</p><p>Is he? Instinctively, unconsciously, with every year of his life, he’s grown more withered, a pathetic creature, an insect, a weed. He yearns for touch and touch repulses him.</p><p>For a long time they sit, and Alfred basks greedily in this: the comfort, so unlike a demon’s offering. Arthur does not try to tell him anything, doesn’t tell him not to cry. Is it on purpose? Even if it isn’t, Alfred takes greater comfort in that than he would in the reassurance: this is the world, this is the world, and its implosion is imminent, and he will never be alone within it.</p><p>“I wish I could feed you,” Alfred sobs. “I wish I could help you. I really do.”</p><p>Arthur’s lips brush his temple, and he holds Alfred tighter.</p><p>He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Arthur has bought purple lilacs for the windowsill. He waters them now, singing aubades in languages whose names are long forgotten.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>A routine develops. Alfred does not need to hear the distant clanging of pans or Arthur’s footsteps to know he is awake, because the air itself adopts a different clarity, and he has forgotten already the nature of the atmosphere that permeated the apartment when he lived alone; though he enters the kitchen too late to help Arthur in any meaningful way, they watch the leaf-barren branches outside in the early wind and they eat, together (vinegar and jam, toast slathered with clover honey, black tea and coffee near to white), which itself feels like a kind of caring; after Alfred finishes working they walk around the city’s quietest corners, or else play music, bicker a little over the genre; he listens to Arthur read from old novels and the labels of packages in a voice that recalls nostalgia for nonexistent childhoods.</p><p>Evenings, he grades papers to the tune of droning from the television, a film, a play Arthur has selected. At precisely six he’ll hear the water running, he’ll hear Arthur humming in the bath. Once he comes out and lets Alfred shower, they have dinner, takeout to be eaten in the living room because Arthur’s luck with the cooking can’t be tested again; and he retires to the couch afterward, Alfred to his desk before groping an uncertain path to the bed at midnight. (The night is still. His vision blurs.)</p><p>Are they domestic? He’ll deny it once and won’t bother the second time. For what a strange thing, to be domestic: it is warmth, it is warmth like a pocket-sized sun. The aspen woods of his dreams are familiar even in darkness. His heart thrums at the sight of them. The wind, howling, comes down the hill, then is silent.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>They have gone to a bookstore where Arthur, with a usual arsenal of criticism at the tip of his tongue, opts to scrutinize the back of every other book he finds while elbowing Alfred whenever he tries to join in. He’s sitting opposite Alfred in the adjoining cafe, now, and thumbing through a poetry journal. He fiddles with his teabag. He looks very nice.</p><p>What of their relationship? There are no secrets between them, except the unimportant ones. Alfred talks on and on about Arthur but never speaks his name, fearing something will break. He wants to call him his friend, but even his friends haven’t integrated themselves so completely into the bitter routine of his life. In magazines and in overheard conversations he’s learned of interstitial phases, friends with benefits, almost-friendships and almost-lovers, enemies who were once friends, friends who were once lovers. Complicated phases. He has always been a coward, however, in the most significant way, which is to say in the domain of his own emotion, and so he avoids thinking of himself and Arthur in any terms but this: he is himself, and I am myself, and we live together, and this is all.</p><p>“Francis contacted me today.” This from Arthur, who cringes as he chances a sip from the tea still boiling hot.</p><p>“Francis from your school?”</p><p>Arthur nods slowly, tucks a strand of hair behind his ear.</p><p>“Ostensibly I’m failing to meet my quota for the semester. It isn’t a problem yet, he says, but it’ll put a black mark on my record all the same.”</p><p>“And this means…?”</p><p>Tapping his finger against the page he’s reading, line upon line arranged like a diamond. “It doesn’t mean anything at the moment. I’ll just have to work harder, is all.” He frowns. “But where to start?”</p><p>This, of course, the conversation they never address.</p><p>Arthur will have to leave him, maybe sooner, maybe later. Where will he go then? Back to a home he hates, and there is no determining what will become of him after that. Alfred isn’t needy, but the presence of another takes eternities to unlearn.</p><p>“What is your project, anyway?” Alfred asks, swallowing down a certain thought.</p><p>“I—huh, I really haven’t told you already?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Oh. Well, I’m collecting data on, uh, lust. The nature of it. Something like that. Christ, but I’m too tired to be more coherent than this. I’m sorry.”</p><p>Alfred traces circles on the lid of his coffee. “It’s fine. How far along are you?”</p><p>Arthur’s clothes billow around him when he wanders the apartment. His wrists are smaller than they ever were; Alfred can hold them both in one hand. Knowing this makes him sick.</p><p>“Er, halfway through? A little less than halfway. Honestly, I just haven’t been feeling up to it.”</p><p>“Yeah, I get it. And this isn’t, like, a normal project either, right?”</p><p>“No, never. I’ve never had to—well, I’ve never had to really use my skills except on my own terms. Certainly nothing like this. Pheromones and whatnot. It makes me feel like a cockroach.”</p><p>But of course: Arthur’s charms. Alfred wonders why they haven’t ever affected him, as if the poison in his own system conflicts with Arthur, or that his terminal sadness runs too deep to be unsettled.</p><p>“You’re not a cockroach. You’re at least a praying mantis.”</p><p>“Oh, pfft. Well, thanks.”</p><p>They drink. The choking sensation returns.</p><p>Alfred thinks, What the fuck? He’s just a demon and I’m just a man. Why can’t I imagine going to sleep without having thought of him anymore?</p><p>“Hey, Arthur,” he begins, voicing a question he has held from the moment he found Arthur beaten bloody on the pavement.</p><p>“Be honest with me. Do you really want to go back home?”</p><p>Have Arthur’s eyes always been this clear?</p><p>He exhales. Alfred hadn’t seen him inhale.</p><p>“To be honest? Not really. To be honest, I’ve been dreading the day I have to go back before I even came here. It’s the punitive assault, the waking to find your friend’s head on the ground before a guillotine. He came to me crying just the day before, then was executed. I closed his eyes, I stroked his hair.”</p><p>Arthur seems to contemplate something, and laughs.</p><p>“You probably think this all very cruel. But I don’t mind, really.” </p><p>He starts to continue, doesn’t.</p><p>All of Alfred’s own confessions he’s made without the expectance of a reply. He would not be so much offended by dismissal as he would be disappointed to be ignored. When confronted with the same from Arthur, none of his responses seem to carry even half-meaningful weight.</p><p>Arthur speaks again before he has to: “There isn’t much of a place for me on earth, either. All these people, all this noise. But—really. I’ll make it work. I will.</p><p>“You’re here, after all, aren’t you?”</p><p>Alfred sputters. “I—”</p><p>Arthur stands, reaches out a gloved hand. All of him shines in the low lamplight.</p><p>“Let’s go back?”</p><p>Perhaps he should have said something more. A different kind of haunting, death in miniature: but how could he ever approach this? Arthur asks nothing of him but his patience and still he waits and he waits and can’t help the knowledge of failure that he has convinced himself is their reality. In the first place, it is forever a possibility that Arthur, trembling, a child alone in a forest, is more scared than he is, and selfishly enough this is an idea which is beautiful to him. </p><p>Moments before they exit the shop, Alfred pulls him close, the jut of bone he feels beneath his shirt, and kisses him. It’s all he can think to do.</p><p>…</p><p>They’re fine.</p><p>It’s getting ever colder and litter clogs the river and they’re fine.</p><p>Arthur begins to run, running the path back home, the outline of his breath visible before him in the enduring chill.</p><p>Alfred laughs, calling out to him, <em>What could you possibly be trying to do, going as fast as you are? </em>, but Arthur keeps walking, his footsteps ringing out the fragmented sounds of the city as it begins to shut up and wind down. Under his breath he’s saying something, words too delicate to hear:</p><p><em>I hold out my hand.<br/>
</em><em>I hold out my hand.<br/>
</em><em>I hand over </em><br/>
<em>and I pass on.</em></p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>When they’re alone, Alfred feels as though they can’t touch. Always something like shame when he tries, and it is not for lack of trying: though less frequently these days, Arthur will still come to sit with his chest pressed to Alfred’s back, or clasp his hand between his own if ever Alfred goes too long without a hint of conversation. They’re ghost touches, he feels them even when he isn’t thinking, and Alfred—well.</p><p>He passes his days marking down Arthur’s habits. He makes, of course, Alfred’s bed, without fail, after Alfred leaves for work. He puts the teabag in before pouring the water. He takes his tea with milk, never sugar, and he sits as close as he can to the center of chairs or couches or beds, a king on a throne.</p><p>More difficulty in paying attention to how he moves, how he manipulates the objects in his hands (watering can, ballpoint pen)—it is an observation that feels perverse, somehow, even when he only watches with his own palms clasped inexplicably together; more than once he’s felt heat at his face and turned swiftly away upon noticing Arthur stopping, turning to look at him. Is it affection?</p><p>It occurs to him that Arthur is more beautiful than he has ever suspected, in ways he has always known, and about this he says nothing at all.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>The lilacs are in full bloom.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Sometime between then and now, Alfred is made aware of just how many of their idle days he’s related to his students. My roommate, he’ll tell them—well, he really just came out of nowhere, and listen to all he’s done already—and everyone in the room exchanges a certain look, but leaves it at that.</p><p>This until a girl, a sophomore, visits him after class and asks him outright whether he is in love, or experiencing psychosis.</p><p>He laughs good-naturedly.</p><p>“I’m serious,” she says.</p><p>“You’re important to us, Mr. Jones. And you don’t just <em>find</em> people the way you said you did.”</p><p>Rearranging papers he doesn’t need to rearrange. The word <em>symbiosis</em> leers up at him from one. </p><p>“Oh, did I say that?” </p><p>“You did! And frankly, it’s very concerning.”</p><p>“You sound like him.”</p><p>And then he realizes what he has said, and his face drains of color, and he resolves to stare nervously down at the table. His student begins to reply, then pauses. When he looks up again she’s surveying the room, the empty rows of desks on whose surfaces the afternoon light gleams.</p><p>The student opens her mouth, closes it. She hikes her bag higher up her shoulder.</p><p>“Well, whatever,” she concedes. “It sounds like you really care about your roommate, whoever he is and however you found him.</p><p>“Please look out for yourself and for him. That’s all I’m asking.”</p><p>He tells her, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” and laughs again, waving her away—but that night he lies awake, asking himself without end: Am I in love? Is this what love is, an autumn and a demon and a flicker of light?</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>A dream of his: the world is burning, burning, himself within it. The forests burn, the oceans: fire, impossibly, on the water, reaching to the tops of static pines; in the illumination of its flames, a blinding blazing sunset, are revealed the open lawn of his childhood home and the shapes of invisible cities, imaginary lovers; millions upon millions of bodies piled, writhing, withered, their throats cut; rooms without houses; houses without windows; airless landscapes filled with light-swollen holes; war and war, death, death, the salt of the earth, an aberration, a paradox, all burning, burning.</p><p>And he burns, too: tendons, flesh, muscle, bone, teeth, eyes; a crucible, an unbecoming; he comes apart, here screaming, there silent, tears he can’t feel, incantations he can’t speak (piercing, driving deeper and deeper into the litany of the heart), as the pieces of him around the littered branches fall: eyes, teeth, bone, muscle, flesh, tendons, everything, everything, everything.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>He wakes to a pair of hands shaking him, the cold air of evening or morning flowing now across his exposed body. A spell of thunder to unsettle his skull’s interior.</p><p>“Alfred,” he hears, which is, yes, his name (he blinks, glancing uneasily around): his name, jarring enough without context.</p><p>“Alfred.” Again.</p><p>Even to whisper feels obscene. “What?” he manages, though it’s hoarse and almost impossible to distinguish from the lull of the wind.</p><p>Dual moons resolve themselves into eyes (everything, everything) and around them Arthur’s face.</p><p>“Alfred.” Arthur’s voice, softer than it was before. “You were screaming.”</p><p>To this Alfred could reply with a number of platitudes, or just <em>Oh</em>, or <em>Of course I was screaming, damn it, nothing in my life is ever going to be the way it used to be</em>—but what good would that do?</p><p>He draws the blankets tighter around himself. It’s nearly winter.</p><p>Arthur wrings his hands, weary and concerned at the side of the bed. “Do you want to talk about it?” Some hesitance in his asking.</p><p>Though it could be close to a full minute until Alfred answers, he does not, during that time, think once about what he should say or do. He wonders how it might feel to be somewhere else, alone, or in a crowd whose attention he can manipulate at his own desire. Nothing like this: only Arthur is here, Arthur and the careful rhythm of his breathing and a room that all at once feels too constrained.</p><p>He supposes Arthur is trying to find some way to occupy the silence—a cough, a burst of nervous laughter—but instead he inhales, holds it, and sits gently down on the covers beside him.</p><p>“I have nightmares, too,” he says on the exhale, following what Alfred imagines to be a length of vast uncertainty.</p><p>Alfred extends his hand and Arthur takes it, never once looking away.</p><p>“Do demons dream?” he asks.</p><p>(A demon, a sick angel. What might the difference be? He distantly recalls watching the sky on days which were just empty, when all he could think to do was watch. What was there? Nothing, he supposes. There was nothing. But remember: the burning, the entrapment, the ceaseless falling. Here, in a garden without flowers, an angel is dying every day of their life.)</p><p>Arthur’s next breath is audible, if barely.</p><p>“I was a human once.” </p><p>He looks to the window and there is no one out on the street.</p><p>“I don’t remember it at all anymore. I could have lived thousands of separate lives and I wouldn’t have remembered—but the sensation.”</p><p>Here he pauses for a long time. Alfred does not take his eyes off that stilled form, can’t imagine doing it, every subtle twitch of Arthur’s hand or jaw worth observing forever. His breath catches when Arthur turns back.</p><p>“These are my dreams,” he’s saying. “They’re abstract, they’re from that time. Do you understand? Well—I suppose you don’t have to.</p><p>“I can’t see anything, or hear it. Pure sensation, like fear or hatred, and strange colors, and every night—and every night I wake terrified.”</p><p>He sighs again. It’s rare for him to rely so heavily on his consciousness when he talks, no eloquence, no sense of direction. Pure sensation, he confesses, a sentiment which Alfred immediately recognizes or remembers, a long-dead dream of his own to hold like so many flowers in his trembling hands.</p><p>In the dark, Arthur is waiting.</p><p>“I understand,” is what Alfred tells him at last, at long last. He considers saying more, and he considers… </p><p>“You don’t have to say any more,” Arthur says, then. “You don’t have to say anything.</p><p>“When I was much younger, I would wake up from the nightmares and wish I could scream, or else wish for someone right there, right beside me, who would stab me to death before I fell asleep again. What I mean to say is that I wished I could vocalize my fear somehow, but that feeling of fear was as hard to grasp as all the dreams were.</p><p>“These days I’ve gotten much better at self-control. I tried to create some version of my human life outside all the fear, and I thought: if I could sing myself to sleep every night, the way a mother would, would anything be any better? Would anything change? And I tried to. I tried so many times and I’m still trying. And nothing changed, but true to my word I did feel safer when I slipped into the nightmares again.</p><p>“So if you don’t have anything to tell me, that’s alright. I’ve been telling myself all this time that the words don’t matter any more than the melodies do. If some perfect morning I find that I can’t feel or see anything anymore, well. I wouldn’t be surprised at all.”</p><p>The rest they leave unspoken, floating between them like a perfume or a song. There is a reason Arthur will stop to gaze out at sunsets and the roofs of cathedrals when they walk together, kicking up golden leaves: nowhere else to stop, nothing else to prove he lives now in a world which rejects him so completely (the ending of a day, of an entire war, the ever-lingering shadow of the divine). If he allowed himself even a moment of respite, he wouldn’t ever know forgiveness, and this is a fate which he has lived too long to accept.</p><p>In the present, Arthur draws closer, his other hand moving to stroke Alfred’s hair. Alfred leans into the warmth of that touch, his eyes closing. Through the stillness Arthur’s voice carries: <em>Alas, my love, you do me wrong to cast me off discourteously; for I have loved you well and long</em>—</p><p>He stops, embarrassed.</p><p>“You can keep going,” Alfred whispers, opening his eyes just slightly.</p><p>Arthur doesn’t; he stares down at the covers. </p><p>Something flutters just beyond the window.</p><p>“I wanted to feed from you.” </p><p>He swallows, clenches his hand tighter around Alfred’s. </p><p>“I meant to seduce you and I knew it was for my own heart even when I told myself otherwise and—Christ, things don’t go like they should. And I knew this was going to happen, too. I met you and I didn’t feel anything then, at first. But I knew it would change the longer we were together, and I did it anyway.”</p><p>Because Arthur had just told him he doesn’t need to say anything, he stays quiet. But because there are words for this, after all, he speaks.</p><p>“You don’t have to try to stop it. I didn’t.”</p><p>His voice is soft, and Arthur looks as though someone has just told him everything he never wanted to hear. He studies Alfred’s eyes, his lips, and then:</p><p>“What is it, Alfred?”</p><p>Alfred shudders. He’s repressed for so long. The questions come before he even knows what he’s asking.</p><p>“Am I a burden? Do you wish I were someone brave? Do you hate that I care for you?”</p><p>Raw as a child. He suspects Arthur has his answer long before he ever speaks.</p><p>“Not you, Alfred. Never you.”</p><p>He’s heard it said that there is nothing poetic about the city: the traffic, the smog. The other apartments’ lights have dimmed, however, no music or conversation drifting out to the street, and so he and Arthur could be anywhere, in a forest, in a meadow saturated by moonlight, and it would be the same. They would sit, and feel, and wait for something that has already come.</p><p>And then:</p><p>Alfred touches two fingers to Arthur’s wrist, directly at the pulse point.</p><p>“Just now.” He sighs, almost mournful. “You said my name.”</p><p>The night clouds have gathered, further darkening the small room, and so he can’t figure Arthur’s expression—but Alfred knows regardless that he’s smiling.</p><p>“I did.”</p><p>Arthur begins to sleep in his bed after this. It will be only for the next few days, they each promise, then the next few, and by the time the moon has swallowed itself and the first snow falls over all the parks and rooftops they can’t see, Alfred is clinging to his arm every night, saying <em>Don’t leave, don’t leave </em> without ever noticing<em>.</em></p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>His old college roommate comes to visit on the day the last leaf wilts, falls from the tree outside his apartment. His hands are empty, and the red scarf he wears offers the only color between the door and the blank expanse of hallway just beyond.</p><p>“Kiku!”</p><p>Somewhere in the background, Arthur perks up. Why would he perk up? Perhaps one of them is paranoid, the balance they’ve established unsettled somehow by this new intrusion.</p><p>“Hello, Alfred.” Here it is: Kiku’s discreet smile, from which anyone could extract absolutely any intent. “I was in the area and I figured I’d stop by. Sorry about this being unannounced. I don’t want to take up too much of your time…”</p><p>“Oh, Kiku, no! You wouldn’t, just come on in—”</p><p>He steps aside and Kiku enters. Their ensuing conversation passes from work to travel to culture, and throughout it he sees Kiku taking curious glimpses of, among others, the sweater draped over the back of the couch; the worn leather shoes in the foyer; the shelf full to brimming of vintage books, their spines broken. The sounds of Arthur’s movements echo, faint, as he slips from room to room.</p><p>“Who is that?” Kiku asks after a time, in the middle of a sentence. Alfred tilts his head, and he looks over his shoulder at Arthur standing behind them.</p><p>“Oh,” Alfred says, then pauses.</p><p>That’s Arthur, he thinks to himself, Arthur whose processes are more than enigmatic and more than fascinating for being so, Arthur whom he is just learning to touch for the sheer comfort of it (a brush of the fingers, a kiss on the forehead); Arthur who comes from hell and whose eyes shimmer with the openness of the earth, and Arthur without whom he could not imagine the autumn and the winter and all the rest of his life.</p><p>What to even call a person like this? They are more than a person, they are the home and the hearth and the name hidden in the garden of every memory. He can no longer pay the rain any mind without hearing Arthur’s voice between every falling drop. It is less than a chaining, more like a binding, but always more, more, always the adoration that takes him and takes him and devours him whole.</p><p>“...my boyfriend,” he says at last, and when he does the whole of his voice trembles for the effort of simply forming the words’ shape, almost dissipating, entire, by the final syllable. </p><p>My boyfriend. That’s what he’s said.</p><p>He can’t look away quickly enough to avoid seeing Arthur’s face suffuse with blush.</p><p>But Kiku hardly acknowledges this, their reactions: he gives a laugh, serene like white egrets on the water.</p><p>“I see,” he says, and the conversation resumes.</p><p>After he leaves, Arthur immediately sprawls across Alfred’s lap, loops his arms around his shoulders, gazes upward into his nervous face with a tremulous smile.</p><p>His boyfriend, he said.</p><p>It’s enough.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Arthur is on the couch, eating strawberries.</p><p>“Hey, give me one,” Alfred says.</p><p>“No,” Arthur says.</p><p>And Alfred grins and leans forward to take the strawberry’s other end between his teeth, and kisses Arthur after he swallows.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>“I want to try,” Alfred says, and when Arthur glances at him quizzically he continues: “I want to try feeding you again. More, I mean.”</p><p>At this Arthur straightens in anticipation, conceals it poorly.</p><p>“You really mean it?”</p><p>Alfred, unmoving, nods. “If you’ll let me. I can’t let you starve, Arthur.”</p><p>His arm is seized by the man in question. “No, I don’t want you to do this because you feel obligated—”</p><p>“No, no, no—” Alfred plucks Arthur’s fingers, one by one, from his arm; he lets the touches linger. “It’s never like that. I just want to…”</p><p>Wants. Wants to. Somehow he’s never imagined they could or would reach this point, an exchange that does not seem like an exchange at all. What lust he perceives Arthur with has its root, really, in a need to take him, as though he were something very precious, and hold him near to his heart, and keep him there, like sheltering a bird from rain. From protectiveness (so he believes) has sprung possessiveness. Were his willpower stronger, these notions would not have become as deeply and rapidly entangled as they are; but he understands what he feels now, which is an overwhelming sense of both, and in a voice which startles even himself he tells Arthur as much.</p><p>“...to let you take everything you’ve ever been denied. That’s what I want.”</p><p>Arthur stares.</p><p>For a terrible moment this feels like the wrong thing to have said. But then Arthur’s expression colors with awe, pure and glistening, and Alfred understands: neither of them have ever spoken or been spoken to this way, a blossoming of the heart, a willingness to let the other empty and fill them all at once.</p><p>“That’s what you want,” Arthur repeats. Then he says it again, to himself this time.</p><p>“You want…”</p><p>His lips part.</p><p>“Okay.”</p><p>He’s smiling, wider and wilder than Alfred has ever known. And then he kisses him, long and tender on the mouth, and pushes him back onto the couch.</p><p>“Okay…”</p><p>Sinks to his knees, spreads Alfred’s thighs apart.</p><p>“I can’t tell you what you’ve been denying yourself,” he says before descending to a whisper (pulling down the zipper, taking Alfred in his hand and licking to the base): “but I’ve needed so, so much.”</p><p>So much.</p><p>Arthur does not take him down his throat immediately. He continues licking, kissing at times, lavishing attention on the head of him and bringing a hand up to stroke. And Alfred does not whimper: he watches and he gapes.</p><p>Arthur’s smile has turned coy, diminished in its feral quality but never its intent. He checks Alfred one last time, peering up through the scrim of his eyelashes, before edging his cock into his mouth.</p><p>As he slips deeper, deeper in, Alfred does whimper (and deeper yet, and deeper yet). His eyes close, and when he opens them again on feeling two fingers tap his thigh, he sees Arthur with his own eyes watering, lips stretched now around the base. It’s obscene, he thinks feverishly, it’s <em>filthy</em>, and it is an honor to have, to feel with every drop of his blood alight.</p><p>The fingers tap again.</p><p>Alfred begins to cant his hips, his cock sliding in, sliding out of Arthur’s mouth. He knows Arthur can take more, more than this gentle fucking, and as though wanting to prove as much he speeds up a little, but Alfred does not want to ruin him (not yet, not yet). When they both sigh this time, it is synchronized. The moment feels fragile as glass stained by sunlight.</p><p>Alfred can feel how wet he is, how needy, and Arthur, hearing him whine, only sucks harder.</p><p>His heartbeat, he thinks, must sound like a military drum. His hips have stilled but for the involuntary twitches. Arthur licks up his precome, delicate strokes of his tongue, and Alfred, in response to the sight, brings an unsteady hand down to tangle in his hair.</p><p>“That’s good.” He sighs, a trembling breath. “That’s g—that’s so good, Arthur.”</p><p>He doesn’t deserve this, some remote part of his mind is telling him, the attention and the affection he’s getting, the care with which Arthur caresses his hands and his face in the night. But Arthur—he plants his own hands gently on Alfred’s thighs, and into them he traces endless patterns with the tips of his fingers, a subtle act of reassurance which for all its spontaneity is instantly enough.</p><p>“So good,” Alfred says again, because what more is there to say? Well—in the past Arthur has whispered to him, called him a good boy, his good boy; and so he says it now, broken sob of praise, to Arthur, whose breath hitches and who bobs his head faster still.</p><p>The only warning Alfred gives before he comes and comes is to tense himself and make a bitten-off cry, but Arthur understands, and he moans, and Alfred feels himself release, all of his body going slack.</p><p>Arthur waits until Alfred is absolutely watching to swallow.</p><p>He wipes his mouth. Beckons Alfred off the couch and to his knees.</p><p>“Now you.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>So certain days they both find themselves too depressed to go out, or watch films, or mimic in any way they recognize the motions of normalcy: so instead they suck each other off and cry: except they don’t cry, because Arthur does not cry in front of other people and Alfred is on prescription sedatives.</p><p>“I won’t startle if you do it in front of me, you know,” Arthur tells him. This is precisely what Alfred has been meaning to say, too.</p><p>“No, Art,” he says instead. “Someone’s built a brick wall right in the middle of my skull, every day I see it in the distance, and just seeing it is so tiring I don’t even bother trying to climb it or break it or make two or three or four of it. At times I think cracking my head open would be easier.”</p><p>He believes he says this, but in truth he only stares into a middle distance that does not exist past Arthur’s face and tries to remember how crying feels, how sobbing does.</p><p>Arthur takes his quivering hand in both of his own, lifts and squeezes it.</p><p>“But of course it’s always you in the end,” is what he whispers, following a silence that sprawls and sprawls. “It’s you, it’s you, it’s you…”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>“Hi. It’s me again. Yeah, I’m doing well—I think I’ve been doing better lately, I mean. I was on the verge of a breakdown the other day, I think—no, I think emotionally I’m somewhere in between now—but then my—my boyfriend was there and he said something and rocked me and I fell asleep and when I woke up I completely forgot what I’d been feeling before. Yeah. He’s in the other room now, but he doesn’t want to be bothered. He’s embroidering. He’s really good at it.</p><p>“He’s been getting better at cooking, I think, too. He made us scones the other day and you know I don’t like tea, or at least not that much, not more than coffee for sure, but he prepares it really professionally, like the way they do at cafes, and it really does taste different with a lot of milk added, you know? Sorry, that doesn’t have anything to do with anything, I’ve just been a lot more excited lately, I guess. What? Oh, yeah, thank you. I miss you, too.</p><p>“When do you think I can see you again? Your winter break is probably coming up soon. And then you graduate after that, right? Seriously! No, Mattie, I’m not gonna regale you with—what the hell are you even saying right now? Anyway, if you fly out over here, you know I’d be happy to take care of you. It’s the same place as last year, yeah. It’s the same view, which is a great view, and we can make you dinner, Art and me. There’s a new park where that apartment complex was last year, the one that was almost abandoned, if you’re interested? Yeah, yeah. Alright. I’ll call you later to talk more about it.</p><p>“I don’t say this often enough, but I really am glad we can talk as often as we do.</p><p>“I hope I can see you soon. Goodbye.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Ever since, in waking and in living out the slow darkening days before thaw, he began to understand with greater acuity the comfort of unremarkable days, of life alongside a lover. There are times when they are apart more often than they are together, Arthur working in the living room, Alfred at his desk, and simply knowing the other is there becomes in itself a form of…</p><p>He supposes there’s no shame in saying it aloud. But perhaps it’s best, still, to keep it secret.</p><p>And this he knows: Arthur has not fed from anyone else in months; not once has he voiced or acted even a semblance of regret; hell, pitiful, ashamed, has turned him away.</p><p>For who has use for an incubus that refuses to feed but from one person, hopelessly ill? Arthur will think of all he has abandoned, his studies, his attractiveness to others; and he will sigh a little, outwardly, at the idea, then bury his face in his hands for just a moment, pressing closer to Alfred’s body, then straighten and smile to himself.</p><p>For who has use for hell?</p><p>“Let’s bond,” Alfred whispers to him one day, meaning let me bind myself to you and you to me, meaning let me take care of you and you of me, meaning—</p><p>“Yes,” Arthur says, sobs, before his voice shakes apart like a shattering fractal, like a fog at dawn.</p><p>“Yes, yes, yes.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>He leads Arthur to their bedroom. Of course they stumble just outside the door, holding onto one another, and of course they kiss when they rise. By the time they undress and collapse, together, on the sheets, their limbs are already tangled: there are the fingers that caress him, and the nimble hands, and the arms corded with muscle and now shimmering with sweat. And here, in the certainty of their closeness—moving ever downward, he comes to Arthur’s legs and between them buries his face.</p><p>Buries: before Arthur can get in a word about what he wants, how he’d like to be touched, Alfred is kissing selfishly up the inside of one pale thigh; and moments before reaching his cock, which is now flushed and curving slightly toward his stomach, he turns to Arthur’s other thigh and does the same. And Arthur—Arthur who is immovable as stone when he sits and works, Arthur on whose sleeping form the birds will land and sit—he writhes, and he hisses, and he does not pretend once to hide his need to do either.</p><p>“Please,” Alfred hears, though the word doesn’t really begin or end anywhere, just a dream of a plea, a want for more.</p><p>So he comes forward, just a little, to take Arthur’s cock into his mouth.</p><p>Arthur’s hips twitch violently at this, which encourages Alfred further: in a moment he is swallowing him down, choking a little, and sucking. It could be a just half a minute he spends like that, working his tongue down the length, or five—what matters is that Arthur is responding with vigor, bucking his hips and making Alfred struggle to keep as much as him as he can inside. When Arthur starts to tense up, his spasms longer, Alfred pulls his mouth off and tries to ignore the plaintive sound that Arthur makes in response.</p><p>As he feels Arthur regain his composure over the course of another minute, Alfred strokes him, pumps him once, blinks down at him through a scattered cloud of aching.</p><p>“Do I need—I mean, do you need to—”</p><p>Arthur shakes his head. “I’m ready,” he’s whispering. “I’m ready for you.” </p><p>Because he’s an incubus, because he’d prepared for his lover before they’d ever come, breathless, into this room (he imagines Arthur working himself open, the hem of his shirt between his teeth)—Alfred does not care, he doesn’t, and he scissors two fingers inside of Arthur anyway only to hear him keen and sigh, that beautiful sound. For a few moments it is just the relief and the pleasure and the noise, the feeling of something wet, something quiet and loud, less like carnality and more like tenderness: but then Arthur takes his face between his palms, saying “Hurry, hurry, fuck me,” and Alfred is reminded that he can feel all this and more if only he does what Arthur asks.</p><p>“Yeah.” It is a ragged breath, barely a word at all. “I’ll take care of you, let me take care of you, God—”</p><p>He holds his cock steady with one hand and, on seeing that confirming smile, eases himself into Arthur, pausing at intervals to let himself sigh into his neck, to breathe in. Behind his back Arthur’s arms link together, pressing them tighter to one another until Alfred barely has space to pull out—but he manages, anyway, lifting his hips after a shaky exhale during which he resolves to move for the sole purpose of giving Arthur as much pleasure as he knows they both want. Arthur immediately whines, clawing at his back.</p><p>“God, God,” Alfred’s still saying, stuttering.</p><p>“You—” Arthur gapes up at the ceiling (light from the window slanted across). “You’re here, you’re really inside me—”</p><p>Alfred slams himself back in.</p><p>Arthur arches—nearly screams—his fingers curl—and Alfred, mesmerized, cannot even feel smug or pleased or anything beyond the need to keep going, keep going, until there is nothing left between them but the coarseness and the intimacy.</p><p>He works up a rhythm which is not really a rhythm, here slowing, there breaking up his pace. Sensation overwhelms him: the heat, the pulse, the pull of enchantment with which Arthur draws him back in, wordless, every time. He thrusts his hips up to match; interspersed with their motions are cries, sharp and lovely, from Arthur; and panting from them both; and Alfred reaching down to stroke him off, faster and faster; and Arthur’s head lolling back onto the mattress.</p><p>Arthur is looking at him, looking in the truest sense, his eyes wet and shining and verdant; Alfred leans forward to kiss him and kiss him and kiss him; and to him Arthur is crying out, every atom in his body is crying out, Love me, love me, and by God do it now; Love me, because this is the purest I have ever felt, and the best I have ever known; Love me, because if I disappear tomorrow, blue and bloated on the edge of the sea, cut up on a twilight street, dead, dead, gone, gone, this is all I’ll ever need, and I’ll come back to you, I’ll come back to you, and I’ll love you too.</p><p>Alfred sobs as he comes. When Arthur follows, his nails dig so deeply into Alfred’s shoulders they both know he’ll wake with crescents bitten into his skin.</p><p>In the same breath, Alfred’s strength gives out. He falls onto Arthur, who strokes his hair, and there’s the shape of a melody floating between them, <em>Alas my love</em>, but they each remain there in silence; and there is nothing, not anymore, for them to hide or to share.</p><p>Outside, the snow is falling.</p><p>They watch, Alfred lying on top of Arthur’s chest, the two of them connected purely by touch and the uneven sound of their breathing. They watch for a long time.</p><p>When at last they pull apart, spent, trembling, neither of them know who it is that turns to the other first and smiles, ascending to a brighter laugh.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>So winter passes. So he wakes one rosy dawn and hears the birds again.</p><p>Arthur is singing an old folk tune by the window, never reaching the last verse; Alfred comes up behind him, and Arthur turns before they can touch.</p><p>“Spring,” he says. What a delicate thing.</p><p>Arthur brushes his fingers against his cheek like he always does.</p><p>“You’re awake already,” he replies, and smiles.</p><p>“Lord knows why.”</p><p>Arthur really laughs, then.</p><p>“Come have breakfast.”</p><p>It is, as it turns out, another ordinary day: they eat, and they sing off-key, and they try to feed the birds but fail, and they walk in the park, and they shower with Arthur lathering his hair, his shoulders. It is ordinary because Arthur is there, and because there is something about ordinary days which description does not satisfy. Alfred is still sick, he’ll be sick forever—but who has use for constance? At times, even the wolves stop howling.</p><p>It is, as it turns out, another ordinary night: they lie in the same bed, and Arthur falls asleep before him, and in the silence and the dark Alfred searches for something to think about until he does, too.</p><p>So he imagines every airplane in the world moving, Seoul to Sichuan, Chicago to the City of Angels, reduced to ruddy specks of pure, freezing light; and if he wakes up the way he falls asleep, which is to say with Arthur’s leg at his hip and his arm around his waist—but Arthur shifts in his sleep, unsettling the sheets, and even so Alfred suspects he’ll stir at the first glimpse of dawn, he’ll shuffle into the kitchen, and he will turn around and tell him good morning when Alfred follows hours later, hours later. And if this is true, he won’t think to question anything about it: for there is the elm in the window, there is your lover in the kitchen: and every night of his life he’ll wander, and wander, and dream of flight.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>“I hand over and I pass on” -- Tradition, Juliana Spahr</p></blockquote></div></div>
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